HOW DOES CULTURE INFLUENCE CONFLICT RESOLUTION? A …

[Pages:26]Social Cognition, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2001, pp. 324-349

MA oDrryisnaamndicFCuonstructivist Analysis

HOW DOES CULTURE INFLUENCE CONFLICT RESOLUTION? A DYNAMIC CONSTRUCTIVIST ANALYSIS

Michael W. Morris and Ho-Ying Fu Stanford University

Psychologists have taken several approaches to modeling how culture influences the ways individuals negotiate interpersonal conflict. Most common has been the approach of searching for cultural traits-general, stable value-orientations that predict a variety of culturally typical conflict resolution behaviors. Increasingly researchers have adopted a constructivist approach of locating the nexus of cultural influence in the knowledge structures that guide negotiators' judgments and decisions. In this paper, we advocate extending the constructivist approach by incorporating principles from social cognition research on knowledge activation. We develop dynamic constructivist hypotheses about how the influence of culture on negotiation is moderated by the stimulus or task that the conflict presents, the social context in which the negotiator is embedded, and the negotiator/perceiver's epistemic state.

The ways cultures differ in conflict resolution has been of longstanding interest not only to psychologists and anthropologists but also to scholars in the applied fields of international diplomacy and business (for reviews of these different literatures, see Cohen, 1991; Gelfand & Dyer, 2000; Wolfe & Yang, 1996). Contrasts between many different cultural traditions have been drawn and many aspects of the ways individuals negotiate conflict have been compared. In this paper, we focus on one of the most frequently noted cultural differences-the tendency for negotiations in Anglo-American cultural settings to involve more overt competition in comparison to those in Confucian East Asian settings, which

Michael W. Morris is currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Business and (by courtesy) Psychology Department, Columbia University; Ho-Ying Fu is a post-doctoral researcher at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.

We are grateful to Chi-yue Chiu, Ying-yi Hong, Jeanne Brett, and Michele Gelfand for helpful comments about these ideas in response to prior drafts and talks. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michael W. Morris, 708 Uris Hall, 3022 Broadway, New York NY 10027-6902 or sent electronically to mwm82@columbia.edu (URL: ).

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instead involve more harmonious, compromising behaviors. Although many accounts by ethnographers and applied researchers have been primarily descriptive in their aims (Doo, 1973; Goh, 1996; March, 1988), psychological researchers have proposed explanatory models of how culture influences negotiators. In this paper we consider several approaches to modelling the influence of culture and we propose a new approach, which extends the previous ones.

Let us begin with a brief overview. After laying out a few initial conceptual distinctions, we describe the dominant paradigm in cross-cultural psychology, which we call the trait approach. This involves explaining cultural differences as arising from the stable, general characteristics of negotiators, such as the degree to which their value-orientations are individualistic as opposed collectivistic (e.g., Chan, 1992; Triandis et al., 1986). Next, we consider an alternative, the constructivist approach, which draws its inspiration, concepts, and methods from cognitive psychology rather than personality psychology. Constructivists explain cultural differences as arising from the knowledge structures that guide negotiators as they make sense of their conflicts and counterparts and make tactical decisions (Gelfand & McCusker, 1999; Leung, 1987; Morris, Leung, & Sethi, 1995). While noting certain advantages of the constructivist approach in capturing the complexity of cultural influences, we also note ways in which it falls short. We suggest that this research program has not taken its commitment to a cognitive analysis far enough, and in particular it would benefit from incorporating the rich insights about the dynamics of knowledge structures accrued in social cognition research (Higgins, 1996). In the second half of the paper, we delineate a dynamic constructivist model and demonstrate its advantages in integrating findings recalcitrant to previous explanations and illuminating topics not easily amenable to research under the assumptions of previous models.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

In anthropological debates over how to best analyze on the nebulous and mercurial phenomenon of culture, several axes of disagreement are perennial. We see these as highly relevant to the evaluation of psychological research on culture. A first dimension of debate is whether to emphasize the public or private aspect of culture. Conceptions of culture as a public entity can be traced (at least) as far as to Durkheim's notion of "collective representations" which exist as "realities external to the individual" (Durkheim, 1951, pp. 37-38). The location of culture outside of the heads of individuals has been stressed in more recent movements, such as the semiotic analysis that culture exists in the network of symbols individuals use to communicate (Geertz, 1976) and the materialist analysis that it exists in economic and ecological conditions (Harris, 1979). By contrast, conceptions of culture as private or subjective knowl-

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edge are prominently exemplified by Levi-Strauss's (1966) account of encultured thinking as "bricolage" based on elemental frames or constructs, and by ethnoscience studies on the cognitive structures organizing cultural beliefs about domains such as kinship or disease (for a review, see D'Andrade, 1995).

A second divide concerns whether to take the insider perspective of ethnographers who strive to understand a particular culture from "the native's point of view," or the outside onlooker perspective of researchers who strive to compare various cultural groups in terms of some objective standard. Pike (1967) designated these approaches the emic and etic perspectives, respectively, by analogy to phonemic and phonetic approaches to language. The question is whether cultures are described in terms of constructs near to the experience of insiders-constructs that may be specific to the culture and not useful for describing other cultures-or in terms of constructs that are distant from the experience of insiders-constructs which may apply equally well to many or all cultures (Headland, Pike, & Harris, 1990).1

While some theorists have simply opted for eclectism, suggesting that culture both surrounds and infuses individuals, most have taken sides with regard to these dilemmas. The problem is that there have been few principled ways of integrating insights concerning public and private aspects of culture, or of simultaneously working with emic and etic constructs. As we shall see, psychological research on culture taking the trait approach commits itself to an emphasis on private culture and to etic constructs. The constructivist approach has a similar emphasis on private rather than public cultural forms, yet its strength is that it gracefully incorporates both etic and emic constructs. The dynamic constructivist approach that we advocate retains this capacity to incorporate etic and emic constructs and, moreover, it goes beyond previous models in integrating public and private components of culture.

APPROACHES TO MODELLING CULTURE AND NEGOTIATION

TRAIT APPROACH: CULTURAL DIFFERENCES REFLECT VALUE-ORIENTATIONS

A long tradition of anthropological and psychological efforts to model culture has drawn on the concepts of personality psychology. There is an

1. Some scholars have used the terms emic and etic in ways that depart from Pike's definitions (see Headland, Pike, & Harris, 1990). A narrower usage refers to the contrast between culture-specific vs. culture-general constructs. This misses the essence of the distinction in that culture-specific constructs do not necessarily resonate with cultural insiders' self-understandings. Nor do Emic constructs have to be specific to a culture. The key is that they are experience-near rather than experience-distant.

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unflagging intuitive appeal to the notion that the diverse set of behavioral differences across cultures can be traced to a few cultural traits-general, stable characteristics inculcated during socialization. An early model of cultural traits was the notion of "national character" (e.g., Mead, 1935). Psychoanalytically inspired tracts about Japanese national character, for instance, were sponsored by the U.S. government for inclusion in World War II era guides for diplomats and generals (see Druckman, Benton, Ali, & Bagur, 1976). The psychoanalytic view of personality traits has receded in light of more anthropological approaches to conflict, yet conflict resolution tendencies are still explained in terms of internal, stable characteristics having context-general consequences. An example is the thesis that non-Western cultures instill a harmony orientation (Nader, 1969).

Within psychology, the most influential model of cultural traits has been Hofstede's (1980) dimensional analysis of the values distinguishing national cultures. Chief among these is the dimension of individualism-collectivism, on which American and Chinese cultures are polar opposites. Triandis and colleagues (1986) developed a survey instrument to measure individual differences on this dimension. Scores on this instrument have been empirically associated with the American versus Chinese cultural differences in negotiation behaviors such as distributing rewards (Leung & Bond, 1984) and making concessions (Chan, 1992). This instrument has been used by Graham and colleagues in numerous studies attempting to account for differences in bargaining patterns between North American and East Asian samples, sometimes successfully (Adler, Brahm, & Graham, 1992; Graham, Mintu, & Rodgers, 1994) and sometimes not (Graham, 1983). Although unrivaled in its influence, the individualism-collectivism construct has come under increasing critique on conceptual (Ho & Chiu, 1994) and empirical grounds (Takano & Osaka, 1999).

A different model of cultural values has been identified by Schwartz (1992) through more psychometrically exacting procedures, resulting in somewhat more specific value dimensions having sounder construct validity. In comparative research with this value survey instrument, Americans are distinguished from other cultures by high levels on the autonomy factor, while the Chinese are distinguished on the social conservatism factor. Country differences in self-reported conflict styles can be explained by differences in these value factors; specifically, American managers' more competitive style was a function of their higher autonomy values; Chinese managers' more avoidant style was a function of their higher social conservatism values (Morris, Williams, Leung, Larrick, Mendoza, Bhatnager, Li, Konds, Luo, & Hu, 1998).

Evaluating the Trait Approach . Models of cultural differences in nego-

tiation as a reflection of traits are a considerable advance over purely de-

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scriptive treatments of cultural differences. There is tremendous parsimony and heuristic value promised in the possibility that myriad differences in negotiator behavior can be explained in terms of a few dimensions of values-values that also could be linked to cultural differences in other behavioral domains. Moreover, within the trait research tradition, one can see a progressive refinement toward more specific constructs having greater construct validity. But the evidence for a causal role of traits in producing cultural differences in conflict behavior is weak, and there are some inherent conceptual limitations to the model.

A key failing is the inability of trait models to capture when culture has a strong influence and when it has a weak influence on a given individual. The evidence of everyday life reveals that sometimes individuals act in culturally typical manners and sometimes not, yet a trait model, much like a stereotype, implies a pervasive, continual influence of culture. A problem with cultural trait models may be their overemphasis on private rather than public aspects of culture, just as personality trait models suffered from overemphasis on internal forces and blindness to roles of situational factors. Sociologically minded scholars have critiqued trait explanations for cultural differences in conflict resolution behavior, offering alternative explanations in terms of social structure that capture the context-specificity of cultural patterns.2 Another problem inherent with the trait model approach of individual difference scales is its need to focus on etic constructs, such as abstract value dimensions, which can be measured with equivalent operations in the two cultures. This method bars the inclusion of the most unique aspects of the psychology of conflict in specific cultures, which can

2. An example of this kind of cultural influence can be seen in the work of Hamilton and Sanders (1988) on differences in retributive justice judgments among Americans and Japanese. They found that Japanese apply relationship restorative sanctions (the perpetrator offers reparations and an apology to the victim) widely in response to workplace incidents whereas Americans apply these sanctions almost exclusively within the family. This difference seemed to arise, however, not from different styles of thinking about which sanctions are appropriate in which kinds of relationships, but from the fact that Japanese are more likely to find themselves in cohesive family-like relationships at the workplace. Similarly, Yamagishi, Cook, and Watabe (1998) challenge the notion that cooperative traits lead Japanese to be more trusting than Americans and instead argue that the difference is caused by an external, public aspect of Japanese society--its system for sanctioning defectors from groups. Consistent with this, they find Japanese, compared with Americans, are more trusting toward an ingroup member but less trusting toward a stranger. In sum, cultures differ in structures or relationships and also in individuals' subjective beliefs about how to respond to these structures (Morris, Podolny, & Ariel, 1998).

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only be captured in emic terms.3 In sum, failings of the trait approach can be understood as arising from both its concepts and methods.

CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH: CULTURAL DIFFERENCES REFLECT KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES

A constructivist approach to cultural differences is inherently less parsimonious than a trait approach because cultural differences are not traced to a single source; the mechanism adduced to explain culturally distinct conflict resolution behaviors is a disjoint list of knowledge structures--implicit theories, mental models, scripts, and so forth--rather than a monolithic, integrated trait or value-orientation. These knowledge structures guide judgments and decisions and, ultimately, direct actions. Constructivism has a long precedent in cognitive anthropology (Levi-Strauss, 1966) and social psychology (Bruner, 1956; Heider, 1958). An ever-increasing theme in basic research on implicit theories, scripts, and other crucial knowledge structures is their domain-specificity (Schank & Abelson, 1977; Hirshfeld & Gelman, 1994), yet a psychologically informed constructivist approach to cultural knowledge has emerged only recently as anthopologists have drawn on cognitive psychology (D'Andrade, 1995; Shore, 1996; Sperber, 1996) and psychologists have turned to culture (Bruner, 1990).

Within the domain of negotiation, the constructivist approach focuses on two pivotal judgments: judging the type of conflict and judging the character of one's counterpart. A negotiation begins when parties judge the event as a conflict amenable to some sort of jointly pursued resolution and apply some event concept or script to plan their actions (Bazerman & Carroll, 1987). Yet even basic event concepts are culturally bound (Morris & Murphy, 1990). One constructivist approach is the ethnographic study of consequential distinctions between types of conflict events (Goldman, 1994; Shore, 1996). Another approach examines consequences of metaphors such as the ones Americans draw to individual sports (leading to competition) and Japanese draw to family relations (leading to compromise). Another approach employs factor analysis to uncover the implicit dimensions used to categorize everyday conflicts (Gelfand et al., 1998). Other researchers have used etic constructs to capture the role of knowledge structures, such as cognitive frames that a given event is ripe for power, rights, or interests-based bargaining tactics (see Pinkley & Northcraft, 1994). Several studies with

3. Methodological treatises in this literature have accorded emic constructs a role in early theory development process but not in the final model (Berry, 1990; Lytle, Brett, Barness, Tinsley, & Janssens, 1995; c f Morris, Leung, Ames, & Lickel, 1999).

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simulated business negotiations have found that Americans are more inclined to apply interest frames and Japanese, power frames (Brett and Okamura, 1998; Tinsley, 1998). 4

The second pivotal judgment in negotiation is interpreting one's counterpart. The knowledge structures most relevant to these judgments are beliefs about causal relationships in the form of general theories or specific expectancies. Substantial evidence suggests Americans are more likely than East Asians to attribute negative behavior by other persons to corresponding personality dispositions because of an implicit theory that individuals control their behavioral outcomes (Morris & Peng, 1994; Menon, Morris, Chiu & Hong, 1999). The potential for this to create cultural differences in negotiation style is clear, given that conflicts evoke negatively-valenced behaviors, such as disagreement. A negotiators attribution of a counterpart's behavior to a personality low in agreeableness gives rise to decisions to resolve the conflict through competitive procedures, such as arbitration, rather than cooperative procedures, such as informal bargaining (Morris, Larrick, & Su, 1999). An influential study by Leung (1987) found that Chinese versus American differences in decisionmaking about procedures were driven by differing expectancies about how to produce harmony, not by differences in the value placed on harmony. Further, Morris et al. (1995) found that Americans' more pessimistic expectancies about bargaining reflected their greater tendency to believe that the counterpart's negative conflict behavior was caused by a personality low in agreeableness. Another cultural difference arising from expectancies about personality was noted by Bond and Forgas (1984), who found that Chinese and Australians differ with respect to which perceived personality characteristics, such as conscientiousness, foster trust. Additionally, Shapiro and Rognes (1996) found that Americans expect more competitiveness than Norwegians and, perhaps as a result, do not suffer lowered success in negotiations as a function of their opponent's actual level of competitiveness, as Norwegians do. Overall, a variety of specific expectancies about negotiation counterparts have been shown to produce cultural differences in negotiators' behaviors.

4. Many constructivist researchers have not emphasized or investigated the domain-specificity of the knowledge structures they propose, yet studies that have compared behavior across domains, such as workplace versus family, find evidence that qualitatively different scripts are followed. For example, Americans are more oriented toward relationship harmony in family than work conflicts, yet Japanese respondents report that they handle family conflicts in a much less harmonizing manner than they handle work conflicts (Kim, 1994). Moreover, domain-specificity follows from the concept of scripts as detailed guides to action. Just as stage actors need specific scripts for each play they perform, lay people need specific scripts for different domains of life.

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Evaluating the Constructivist Approach. While not parsimonious, the proposal that cultural differences in negotiation reflect the influence of many discrete knowledge structures has several virtues. First, knowledge structures, such as scripts and expectancies, are well documented; they do not suffer from the dubious construct validity that plagues trait proposals. The methods used to establish the role of knowledge structures can allow for emic or etic constructs (Gelfand et al., 1998). Also, this constructivist approach captures the context-sensitivity of cultural differences. Because knowledge structures are restricted in applicability to particular kinds of stimuli, their impact is limited to specific phases or specific kinds of conflicts in which negotiators encounter a given stimuli or task. Hence, a constructivist account is capable of capturing the domain-specificity of cultural differences.

Nevertheless, the constructivist accounts of culture and negotiation offered in recent research still suffer some sharp limitations. While they explain why a negotiator handles one kind of situation differently than he or she handles a different kind of situation, they do not explain why a negotiator may handle the same kind of situation differently on different occasions. For instance, a Chinese negotiator may handle a problem in a culturally typical manner one day, such as by seeking a harmonious compromise, but on the next day may handle the same sort of problem in a different way, such as attempting to persuade the other with analytic cost/benefit arguments. Although some researchers have emphasized that cultural patterns vary as a function of the stimulus situation, such as whether one's counterpart in the conflict is a member of the ingroup or outgroup (Leung & Bond, 1984), researchers have not explored the other factors moderating knowledge structure activation, the factors that vary from occasion to occasion even when the stimulus situation is unchanged.

DYNAMIC CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH: CULTURAL INFLUENCE THROUGH KNOWLEDGE ACTIVATION

We propose that a more comprehensive and empirically precise model of how culture influences negotiation is possible by incorporating the insights of social cognition theorists, such as Higgins (1996) and Kruglanski (1990) concerning the factors affecting the activation of knowledge structures. One central assumption is that possessing a particular knowledge structure does not entail constantly relying on it (in situations to which it applies). Knowledge structures influence judgments only when they come to the fore of the mind--when they are activated as a guide to the interpretation of stimuli. One determinant of this is the structure's chronic level of "accessibility," and cultures may vary

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